Pot | featured news

Hit the slopes - and then a bong? Marijuana legalization votes this week in Colorado and Washington state don't just set up an epic state-federal showdown on drug law for residents. The measures also open the door for marijuana tourism.

He says he knows lots of people scurrying to the shadows as the state has struggled and failed to regulate the medical cannabis industry and local law enforcement agencies and the federal government have tried to curtail it.

The researchers didn't find the same IQ dip for people who became frequent users of pot after 18. Although experts said the new findings are not definitive, they do fit in with earlier signs that the drug is especially harmful to the developing brain.

An 87-year-old man was charged with growing more than 400 marijuana plants at his Colorado home.

The federal government is moving to shut down the nation's largest and highest-profile medical marijuana dispensary operation, filing papers to seize properties in Oakland and San Jose where Harborside Health Center does business.

Michael Jolton was a young father with a 5-year-old son when Colorado legalized medical marijuana in 2000. Now he's got three boys, the oldest near adulthood, and finds himself repeatedly explaining green-leafed marijuana ads and "free joint" promotions endemic in his suburban hometown.

Medical marijuana dispensaries would seem to be natural targets for criminals... The models the researchers came up with confirmed that factors such as unemployment, commercial zoning and a high proportion of young adults were indeed associated with higher crime rates. But the number of marijuana clinics in a neighborhood had nothing to do with any of it, they found.

A City Council committee moved forward with a ban on medical marijuana dispensaries Tuesday, approving a recommendation to outlaw storefront pot shops in Los Angeles while allowing small groups of patients and their primary caregivers to grow the drug on their own.

On a suburban block with six family homes, palm trees and views of the surrounding green hills, nothing at 110 Windsor Court stood out. Its occupants, who had moved into the foreclosed house a few years earlier, were quiet types. Until the noise from falling roof tiles alerted neighbors to a fire there one recent morning, and Stephen Snowden, who lived nearby, banged on the front door. Nobody was inside, but firefighters discovered that the house had been converted into a type of illegal business found increasingly in suburbia: a marijuana grow house.

Efforts to legalize marijuana for recreational use are gaining momentum in Washington state and Colorado, despite fierce opposition from the federal government and a decades-long cultural battle over America's most commonly used illicit drug.